Contenders Review: Zendaya gets her act together in this steamy tennis drama Achi-News

No such problems b challenging, where Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Feist bang and smash with such conviction that you feel they must have taken lessons. They did – Zendaya spent three months training with top trainer Brad Gilbert, and romped around sun-drenched courts like Iga Schweitz.

And it’s fitting, because tennis is the supreme passion that unites the three very different characters in the film. And while tennis might be a metaphor for sex or success in Luca Guadagnino’s irresistible steamy drama, it might just be a metaphor for tennis.

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As the film opens, two men are battling it out in the finals of the hard-court La Rochelle tournament, a second-tier event that both players use as a warm-up for the US Open. Art Donaldson (Faist), a multi-part winner trying to fix a career slump, and TPA circuit hack Patrick Zweig (O’Connor) exchange dirty looks during game breaks, but never say a word to each other. They have a history, as we are about to find out.

We then flash back a decade or so to the U.S. Junior Open, where both Zweig and Donaldson are competing. They play doubles together, and are best friends, but one fateful afternoon go see rising star Tashi Duncan (you know who). A competitor in the women’s singles. She’s gorgeous, they agree, and so hot! At the party that night they compete for her attention.

At some point, a threesome It seems possible – a new Yorker The critic wittily called the film “Sponsored by Adidas Jules and JimBut Tashi, the brightest of the trio by some distance, notices that Hart and Patrick seem almost as eager for each other as she is, and walks out of their hotel room declaring, “I’m not a home wrecker.”

However, she eventually chooses Patrick, and they begin dating while she completes her studies at Stanford. Everyone pegged Tashi as a future major winner, and world number one, but all those hopes are derailed when she suffers a horrific career-ending knee injury. Finished before she began, Tashi retreats into herself, says goodbye to Patrick, and finally turns to training.

Patrick, a talented but temperamental flake, soon crashes and burns on the pro circuit, while Art, an outcast, steadily advances. When he runs into Tashi at a tournament, they hit it off, and she decides to be his coach. They get married, and have a child, but their relationship is about tennis.

That tournament in La Rochelle was organized by Tashi to end Art’s terrible form, but Patrick’s appearance changes everything and brings up old wounds.

Beautifully constructed by Guadagnino and his photographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, challenging It’s written like one of those 1930s hard-hitting comedies. Tashi and her boys say really nasty things to each other, and sound like they’re telling it like it is. But everyone has reasons to avoid painful truths.

Patrick knows he wasted his God-given talent to “hit the ball”, and Art deep down never wanted to be a tennis star at all. He wants to quit, and the only thing holding him back is Tashi, who bullied him towards success.

After her injury, Tashi needed a proxy, and wisely chose the more suggestible and hard-working art. The only problem is that she loved Patrick, not him, and that’s her cross to bear.

All this bubbling tension is skillfully woven into the sports narrative, and as we mentioned, tennis is not a foreign background – it is a means of self-expression, almost an art form for these three, a conduit to perfection. Josh O’Connor and Mike Feist are very good as friends-turned-enemies, but this is Zendaya’s movie, and she walks through it like Fury, the annoying, bossy heroine.

,In theaters from Friday, April 26

Rating: five stars

That They Can Face the Rising Sun (12A, 111 min)

Pat Collins has made many fine films over the years, and outdoes himself with this elegant adaptation of John McGahern’s latest novel. Newlyweds Joe and Kate Rutledge (Barry Ward, Anna Badreke) have left London to live in Joe’s hometown of Leitrim. It’s the 1980s, times are tough, and the locals wonder if Joe had a loose screw back into this stagnant economic backwater. Joe is a writer, Anna an artist, and over time they earn the affection and trust of their neighbors.

However, some nuts are tougher to crack, and they must work hard to win the trust of Patrick Ryan (Laure Roddy), a sharp-eyed and economical handyman. A fine cast includes Ruth McCabe, Philip Nolan and Sean McGinley, who delivers a heartbreaking portrayal of lonely bachelor Johnny, but Lalor Rudy is mesmerizing as Pat, a stubbornly single-minded man who knows his time is running out. When death comes, the community gathers to absorb the loss, summoning old songs and customs to ease the pain. This awakening forms the climax of this quiet, brooding and mesmerizing film.

,In theaters from Friday, April 26

Rating: five stars

In the Land of Saints and Sinners (Netflix, 106 minutes)

Liam Neeson would surely have thrived in the great era of Westerns, and The land of saints and sinners Actually he is one. To Rio Grande insert Glencolmsale in 1974, and we are in a similar bandit state. Amiable bachelor Finbar Murphy (Neeson) is well-liked but has a little secret: he works as a hitman for local criminal Laconnie (Colm Meaney), whose enemies he dispatches with a reluctant shrug in lonely woods. He has the good manners to feel bad about it, and he’s just retired when trouble comes to town in the form of a rogue IRA outfit.

Led by firebrand Doran McCann (Kerry Condon), the gang is on the run after killing two children in a bomb attack. When Finnbar emerges from one of them, a war breaks out that seems to end in a murky living room. In his minimalist way, Neeson brings soul to a troubled character, Ciaran Hinds is very good as the honest local watchman/sheriff, Niamh Cusack plays a benign neighbor, and Kerry Condon swears up a storm as the frankly terrifying Duaran. It’s just a good laugh, and one of the better action vehicles of the great Liam.

,On Netflix from Friday, April 26

Rating: three stars